Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[Scotius]

Not gonna lie - that scene with Gatling gun made me laugh out loud. They made only woman in the crew turn the crank - with audible difficulty, while burly guy next to her is casually adding more rounds to the magazine. Much efficient, very equality. 

[magnemoe]

8 hours ago, Scotius said:

Not gonna lie - that scene with Gatling gun made me laugh out loud. They made only woman in the crew turn the crank - with audible difficulty, while burly guy next to her is casually adding more rounds to the magazine. Much efficient, very equality. 

I thought the original Gatling gun was pretty easy to crank, it was designed so the gunner could aim it and crank to fire as you normally do with an trigger, think pumping an semi automatic gun rapidly for high rate of fire.
Now I suspect you locked the elevation and just panned over the target area but still if it require serious power to crank it would be pretty uncontrollable. 
On the other hand it it was badly maintained or more likely this was an crank mounted to an more modern gun it would be hard. As I understand pulling the ammo require more force but magazines on fighter jets are powered to feed the gun. But modern guns are feed by an belt or similar systems. The original Gatling was feed from the top, the 40 mm AA gun famous from WW 2 was also feed from the top with clips. 
Here rounds was to heavy to feed from magazines unless you made the system much more complex. 

But yes armies has a standard of assigning large and strong soldiers the machine gun and other heavy weapons even if they are not the best machine gunner in the squad. 

[DDE]

On 6/8/2023 at 10:36 PM, Shpaget said:

Haven't seen the movie, but the trailer is chock-full of bad stuff.

"I've got a shadow moving across the front of the Moon, and it's not Earth." Too bad it was not Earth, it would have saved the studio some embarrassment., but speaking of shadows, that looks like a terminator, not a shadow of another object.

"This object is roughly the size of a city." Yet the shadow easily covers entire Moon

That shuttle like vehicle takes off without the main engines firing. but keeps all four boosters and the external tank all the way up to the "meteor".

They are hit by a giant rock, but deploying a repair bot will fix it, I suppose.

Shooting guns at asteroids?

If Armageddon and Deep Impact had a baby, and then abused it, neglected it and beat t with a stupid stick.

So bad I want to hate-watch it...

What is it with the recent wave of bad asteroid movies?

[DDE]

5 hours ago, magnemoe said:

The original Gatling was feed from the top, the 40 mm AA gun famous from WW 2 was also feed from the top with clips. 

The largest clip-based loading system I know of is an 82 mm automatic mortar, and it ties with the various 57 mm cousins of Bofors (S-60 is having a new lease of life as of late). Technically there also was a Swedish 155 mm gun, but there you'd use a crane.

[kerbiloid]

Oops, missed the Doomsday Meteor studio name.
The famous Asylum. This explains a lot everything.

[Gargamel]

On 6/8/2023 at 9:57 PM, Superfluous J said:

 

Today I watched the first half of the first episode of Another Life. I'll keep watching it but not because of any of the below.

You made it farther than I could.   

On 6/9/2023 at 6:09 PM, Admiral Fluffy said:

Is this actually true?

Some higher end houses in the south are built with ‘armored’ walls to guard against flying lumber / trees / dolphins.    

[kerbiloid]

... / spermwhales / petunias

[Gargamel]

45 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

... / spermwhales / petunias

Oh no, not again. 

[magnemoe]

On 6/9/2023 at 8:35 PM, kerbiloid said:

A general notice.

Despite the fact that most of American houses is made of plywood and office glue, they have several titanium plates, hidden in secret places of the wall.

Standing behind them is safe, even when the wall is turned into a strainer with barrage of fire.

Don't be lazy, find these plates in advance.

Titanium plates sounds stupid an probably fake, why don't use steel or even concrete, you use titanium as armor on flying stuff or perhaps very gold plated armored cars. 

Then I was in Florida lots of houses near the coast had the garage as ground floor, they lived above it having one or 2 floors. 
Point was that you could easy evacuate it, drive cars to higher ground, carry other stuff up electrical fixing was high even in the ground floor apartment we rented but it was obvious that they expected the apartment would be flooded. And all was concrete with tiles on floor. 

[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Titanium plates sounds stupid an probably fake, why don't use steel or even concrete, you use titanium as armor on flying stuff or perhaps very gold plated armored cars. 

I have no idea, it's a thread about fake science in movies, so I suggested a hypothesis.

(As I said earlier in another thread, it sounds weird, when the people living in plywood houses, are saying that Hiroshima was damaged just because its houses were made of carton, and the Book of Eli is perfectly illustrating the enormous protective properties of this plywood.)

Edited June 12, 2023 by kerbiloid

[Royalswissarmyknife]

On 6/10/2023 at 6:03 PM, DDE said:

So bad I want to hate-watch it...

What is it with the recent wave of bad asteroid movies?

They Even have a Buran Energia like what

WHY IS THE WHOLE THING IN SPACE??????

[Superfluous J]

4 hours ago, Royalswissarmyknife said:

They Even have a Buran Energia like what

WHY IS THE WHOLE THING IN SPACE??????

[magnemoe]

13 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

Kerbal one, well putting hammer SRB on the Kickbaks is staple. For me launching an Saturn 5 style rocket its required to have Soyuz liquid fueled boosters for effect and obviously asparagus. But I can put SRB on them.

Now you had that insane idea of an rocket using two shuttle fuel tanks with 4 shuttle SRB fueling an first stage who was just engines, rest of the core was second stage. 

[DDE]

7 hours ago, Royalswissarmyknife said:

They Even have a Buran Energia like what

WHY IS THE WHOLE THING IN SPACE??????

Akshually... if I saw it right, that was a US shuttle on top of it.

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, DDE said:

Akshually... if I saw it right, that was a US shuttle on top of it.

Shuttle riding Energy.

[kerbiloid]

Btw, the movie, quoted in another thread.

Spoiler

 

Should an underwater dino have small nostrils at the very end of the face?

[farmerben]

I had a very vivid dream.  If you have seen Gene Rodenberry's "Earth: Final Conflict" season one and read Niven's "Mote in God's Eye", then this will seem slightly familiar.  Friendly aliens arrive in our Solar System and make us this offer:  help them to make a copy of their mothership so that they have two fully provisioned ships instead of one depleted ship.  They agree to recognize all of our territorial claims, and buy resources they need by trading high technology products and valuable plants that grow in our atmosphere.  

Humans accept the deal.  However, mysteries and secrets mount.  The friendly aliens are not alone.  They seem to be running from someone.  It turns out not just one someone but many different species of aliens from many home planets.  The explanation of this strange situation in this scenario is due to life being more common near the center of the galaxy.  The center of the milky way has a property like the African savanna.   Large species survive because they have evolutionary time to adapt to their predators.  Some godlike ancestor species millions of years ago terraformed planets in its neighborhood and created this situation.  Some unexplained evolutionary pressure also guided toward intelligence.  

Then something went wrong.  One of the worlds began totally wiping out all its rivals and multiplying at an unbelievable rate.  Consequently all the aliens from the center of the galaxy must flee if they hope to survive.  The competition to survive puts hundreds of alien species in a race.  If they can expand outward faster than the hostile species, they are alive.  But it is uncertain how or if they will expand beyond the galaxy.   We are now in this race.  It just so happens that because we used radio, and gave our locations away, the most commerce loving species showed up here first.  

More aliens are on their way.  One of them is demanding at least as good a terms as we gave the first, even though their technology may be of diminishing returns.

Edited August 11, 2023 by farmerben

[DDE]

22 hours ago, farmerben said:

I had a very vivid dream.  If you have seen Gene Rodenberry's "Earth: Final Conflict" season one and read Niven's "Mote in God's Eye", then this will seem slightly familiar.  Friendly aliens arrive in our Solar System and make us this offer:  help them to make a copy of their mothership so that they have two fully provisioned ships instead of one depleted ship.  They agree to recognize all of our territorial claims, and buy resources they need by trading high technology products and valuable plants that grow in our atmosphere.  

Humans accept the deal.  However, mysteries and secrets mount.  The friendly aliens are not alone.  They seem to be running from someone.  It turns out not just one someone but many different species of aliens from many home planets.  The explanation of this strange situation in this scenario is due to life being more common near the center of the galaxy.  The center of the milky way has a property like the African savanna.   Large species survive because they have evolutionary time to adapt to their predators.  Some godlike ancestor species millions of years ago terraformed planets in its neighborhood and created this situation.  Some unexplained evolutionary pressure also guided toward intelligence.  

Then something went wrong.  One of the worlds began totally wiping out all its rivals and multiplying at an unbelievable rate.  Consequently all the aliens from the center of the galaxy must flee if they hope to survive.  The competition to survive puts hundreds of alien species in a race.  If they can expand outward faster than the hostile species, they are alive.  But it is uncertain how or if they will expand beyond the galaxy.   We are now in this race.  It just so happens that because we used radio, and gave our locations away, the most commerce loving species showed up here first.  

More aliens are on their way.  One of them is demanding at least as good a terms as we gave the first, even though their technology may be of diminishing returns.

As far as stories about aliens go, this is a fairly plausible one given past human colonization habits.

[darthgently]

3 hours ago, DDE said:

As far as stories about aliens go, this is a fairly plausible one given past human colonization habits.

By the third book there has to be a heroic push back toward the center of the galaxy to confront the aggressor perhaps by combining science from humans and several fleeing species together some breakthrough offers hope of victory

[StrandedonEarth]

21 hours ago, darthgently said:

By the third book there has to be a heroic push back toward the center of the galaxy to confront the aggressor perhaps by combining science from humans and several fleeing species together some breakthrough offers hope of victory

The scenario is reminiscent of Niven's "Known Universe" chronology where demonstrating a 'planet-buster' technology was an effective way of deterring a highly aggressive species. But deploying a planet-buster isn't nearly as effective in Star Wars, for various reasons.

[kerbiloid]

Lexx's laughing at all your planet killaz.

https://lexx.fandom.com/wiki/The_Lexx

It's blowing up planets almost every episode, in two Universes.

Do you say "Planetocalypse"? Lexx says it's just Tuesday.

[SunlitZelkova]

Where does the “parallel universe = other dimension” idea come from?

Wouldn’t it be “to get to a parallel universe you have to go through another dimension”, assuming these parallel universes are identical and therefore technically are in the 3rd dimension (I’m not sure if I worded that properly).

Also, as much as the second Spiderverse movie was good, does anybody else think the multiverse is an over used concept in movies nowadays?

[DDE]

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Also, as much as the second Spiderverse movie was good, does anybody else think the multiverse is an over used concept in movies nowadays?

AFAIK most if not all of the barrage is being generated by the two comic book cinematic universes. I think it's commercial and administrative concerns spilling into worldbuilding (nothing new there, really) amidst a creative crisis befalling both of them; multiverses help broaden opportunities for recycling past plot points and dangling keys before the fans' eyes. The Dr Strange movie provides a particularly poignant case, introducing a whole ensemble cast including one crossover and one fan-favored casting appearing for the first time on-screen... and promptly kills them in a rather gruesome manner.

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

AFAIK most if not all of the barrage is being generated by the two comic book cinematic universes. I think it's commercial and administrative concerns spilling into worldbuilding (nothing new there, really) amidst a creative crisis befalling both of them; multiverses help broaden opportunities for recycling past plot points and dangling keys before the fans' eyes. The Dr Strange movie provides a particularly poignant case, introducing a whole ensemble cast including one crossover and one fan-favored casting appearing for the first time on-screen... and promptly kills them in a rather gruesome manner.

Tired: Comic Superhero Multiverse Movie Script Recycling

Wired: Books

[Superfluous J]

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Where does the “parallel universe = other dimension” idea come from?

Imagine our universe is 2 dimensional. A multiverse could be thought of as many such universes stacked on top of each other. They literally exist - and together make up - another dimension. And to travel between them you need to travel in a dimension you don't normally travel in. I.e., another one.